Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 14

Random Eavesdroppings and Assorted Cafe Wino Wisdoms

“You can’t just snort coke and piss away your time screwing
people named after Greek food.”

“The terrorists poured salt all over your ass.”

“Wait ‘till you get a load of my new gray bib.”

“Fast food has disgusting feet in it just like you do.”

“Kids in the south still sing Civil War marching songs dude.
They think they came from, like, cartoons.”

“The English don’t eat pussy man. S’why their teeth are so fucked up.”

“Ready Steady Go was not a Ramones song you hillbilly
cretin. Go back to Florida.”

“I gotta take a piss. Gimme your purse.”

“First really dirty magazine I ever had was Esquire. Hothouse salami man.”

“Are you my mother? What are we, Lutherans?”

“I want the whole room to boo me. Then I get fired.”

“We do it my way and we’re heroes. We’re like barracuda pimp
times two.”

Behold The Great Stopwatch

The world is changing so fast, faster than I can so in the moment of now I am old before my time. I am Clint Eastwood in The Mule, with a bow tie, my hands too large, my bones the bones of a common bird from a cold plateau. Netflix, you must understand, has a show called Happy Jail. I have not watched it but it makes me want to kill the executive responsible so I can go see this prison for myself, a paradox of some kind I am now too ancient to unravel. I am made old by the new vegan Whopper at Burger King. It is poison, naturally. Yet another mobius curse of some kind. This morning I was middle age, even slightly vibrant among my peers owning to exercise and kale and regular glucosamine. Now, now I am confused, an ancient spider emerged from an old gray bath slipper, plotting, scheming, trying to figure out how I can hijack some politician’s credit card so I can have a couple thousand toxic Impossible Whoppers delivered to the guards at a wretched Netflix gulag.

At Some Point In The Future I Was The Sheriff

Sitting out under the grape arbor reading I thought about
the future instead of the words. Some of the visions are so bright and clear they
seem like the past. The one that came to me today as is a few years old now and
about twenty five years in the future at the same time. It is-

I am old. In my seventies maybe. The periodic stints of violent exercise I’ve gone through have turned me into a tree root. Somehow I became the sheriff of some shitty high plains town in a weedy, blasted part of the country. There are trailers here, diners and stores with big, sun bleached plastic signs and all of the parking lots are way too big, designed for crowds that never came. I operate mostly at night, after the quiet place is truly dead, and most of the time I’m looking for people just to let them get away. Sometimes I beat the shit out of people who were mean to dogs or cats.

In this future of yesterday, when it’s cold, I eat bologna and
onion sandwiches in my police car and I have a thermos of crappy coffee. There
is a fat woman in a pink uniform at the only all night diner. The diner smells
like bleach and sorrow and the woman talks about god all the time.

I’m a satisfied old pig because I know all the secrets in this shithole of a town. I know all about the rich lady with the horses, how dangerous she is, how she killed a man. I know what there is to know about the blasted Kentucky slug who owns the furniture store where no one buys anything. He isn’t fooling anyone, especially me, but there’s no point in running him in for his days as a pill jockey in Nogales. Everyone was doing it back then, he just got away with it and all he wants to do is drink himself to death. The rich kids come back to town from college and I pistol whip them preemptively every time. All their best scars are mine. And the jail is always empty, I don’t have a pen to write tickets and I used the pad to wipe up puke one night, god damned buffalo wings. So it’s quiet, and I’m watching, too gnarly to fade out properly, an old man in a car at night.

The Sauce of Lust and Violence

This morning I suffered a moderate collision of thoughts.
Three different notions impacted into one another and then skidded in a tangled
mess down the avenue of my mind for a few minutes before The Sauce of Lust and
Violence eventually resolved as the key. A picture, dear reader, of how I came
to this unlikely place-

The coffee was brewing. I went outside and it was already warm
out there for early morning. I took a seat under the sheltering grape arbor
where I smoke and lately read the poetry of Machado and lit up my first cigarette
of the day. No email on my phone, the cursed object that tethers me so much I
find mildly objectionable, so I opened Phys.org. No sane person would read headline
news while the coffee is brewing, there in the sacred window of the first
cigarette under the grape arbor. But science news is different. Its real news,
the news of our species, not the feartard pap we’re spoon fed by the media, but
the glories of thinking men and women. This morning, the science news made me
mad. And then secretive. Then, finally, I was in a traffic accident, there on
the patio, stunned by the collision in my head.

My ongoing experiment in adult neurogenesis centers around the
arts of food and language. These are the types of neurons I’m trying to grow,
or perhaps the regions of the brain where I’m trying to grow them. I can’t say
I’ve been successful, as you may easily infer from the previous sentence. And I
imagine this is a slow process, though I doubt anyone really knows. In any
case, derailing it early in the day is never in the interest of this program,
and yet right there on page one, in the science news, was the story of a French
daredevil who flew across the English Channel on a hoverboard.

Naturally, I applaud such things. Good for him, I thought. I
clicked on the article and I couldn’t believe it. The daredevil pilot, one Franky
Zapata, landed on a boat halfway across to refuel. Cheeky to claim he’d actually
flown across. He flew to a boat, then flew on. But the author of the article and
this Franky guy seemed to believe it was a big win for France and a first in
aviation history. I read on, increasingly scandalized. Oh yes. He was escorted
by three helicopters. His company is building a hovercar. The French government
gave him over a million Euros to develop his hoverboard for the military. To
encapsulate- a rich guy held a tearful press conference/performance after he
flew his costly man-toy around for a little while, landed and had some coffee
and a scone, and then flew a little way more after that. There was water below
him in case he had to ditch. That water happened to be the English Channel.

I immediately felt it was my duty to build a real hoverboard
and make the flight non-stop. But of course I would do it without a helpful
escort and I would tell no one. I would also fly in the opposite direction,
from England to France, and after I landed, I’d throw the smoking hoverboard in
the sea, walk into town and get hammered on good French wine, eat their meats
and cheeses and flirt shamelessly with their women and generally misbehave
until they ejected me from the country, giving me a free ride home just to be rid
of me. In handcuffs, I would smile the entire way home, even after the
beatings.

But why tell no one? The Sauce of Lust and Violence, of course. I first read about this in the magnificent book A Really Big Lunch by the late Jim Harrison, one of the finest humans to ever walk our good Earth. I tried to find out what the sauce was when he wrote of it but I couldn’t. It’s a secret. But why, I pondered? Simple. We all have secrets. For a writer, I’m an especially secretive man, and I considered them in my grape arbor hoverboard moment. No one I’m related to, for instance, presently has any idea where I live. If you knew them, you’d do the same. Like my English Channel plan (which I decided to never do moments later), many of my objectives and the bulk of my accomplishments are secret. I fear interruption to my happy days, dreading that deranged and evil maniacs might interfere with my neurogenesis efforts. Naturally I have my own Sauce of Lust and Violence. Jim Harrison’s was used when baking a chicken, something I do often. I humbly admit that Jim Harrison is my better, so much so that he is a star in my heavens, but… My secrets are too many now. They are a burden. I share if only the lessen the weight of the crap hiding in my mind, that I might further my neuron growth. Thus, I unburden myself-

Four heads of roasted garlic

One steamed ancho chili

One pickled jalapeno (I make them)

Salt, pepper

Olive oil

Make a stormy, unrestrained, horny sauce from this in your
retro blender and apply to the chicken an hour or so before baking

420 for the first fifteen minutes

320 for the rest depending on weight, apply a second time when
you lower the temp

Baste, save the drippings for The Gravy of Lust and Violence

The Last Man From Houston- New Free Short Story of the Month for August

The Last Man From Houston

An homage to the late Robert Sheckley, my friend

            The Carrier fell into orbit around the star and lost no time finding the asteroid that called it there. The Carrier needed mass. Presently, it was the size of an Old Earth American penny and experiencing a dangerous material fatigue from a crossing it was uncertain it could even make. Within a week it had converted the nickel and iron in the new host asteroid and ejected its pockmarked previous shell into the star, covering its tracks as programmed. It grew, manufacturing nanobots that manufactured bigger bots with more complex functions. In seventy hours the Carrier was the size of a fig. In ninety, an orange. Three hundred hours passed before it began to grow a human from a single strand of DNA. The helix was the only item it carried from the Sol system other than code and a shielded entangled electron.

            The last man from Houston was born seven weeks later. Billy Roy Greeley awakened in a new white room, his mind already formed and full of facts he would process in short order. He looked sixteen years old, barely a man at all, when he opened his eyes. The Carrier was relieved when he spoke.

            “Where am I?” Billy Roy asked in a slight Texas drawl.

            “You’re on a space station,” the Carrier replied in a soothing maternal voice. “Do you know who you are?”

            The young man concentrated. “Yes ma’am. Billy Roy.”

            “Good morning Billy.”

READ THE REST AT http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com

Zombieland Double Tap

I just watched the trailer for Zombieland Double Tap and Hoe. Lee. Shit am I excited. Like all Americans in a time of national crisis compounded by the looming eco disaster, the collapse of the world economy and bla bla bla, I view all zombie shit as educational. And yet, esthetic remains important. Consider the example of lunch, the middle meal. It is, in function, designed to provide you with the energy to be a productive member of your own life. But if you eat something like pan fried slices of pork tenderloin and asparagus with garlic and Szechwan peppercorn from the garden, a little olive oil with rosemary and leftover flatbread you grilled over mesquite coals last night, a slice of warm comte on the side (I just ate all this) then lunch is different. Better. I dare say wiser.

The ingredients of a good zombie flick are much the same. Train To Busan is a fine example. I love that film. I never did bother to learn the name of the protagonist, referred to henceforth as G Money, but critical to the film’s success in my mind was my desire to see G Money die. Spectacularly. Something about him touched the sleeping rabid anarchist in me. Zombieland has such a character. I always want to see this kid perish in movie after movie. I’m talking about the finger sniffing mama’s boy Jesse Eisenberg.

I don’t know where I first saw him, but I do remember my initial reaction. He made me uncomfortable. I was instantly peevish and oddly vicious. I thought that if I had a daughter or a sister I wouldn’t want this hipster shithead to touch her. Then it grew, this dark feeling. I’d read him wrong, I worried, and thought he’s clearly be more interested in the old lady who lives next door to me. After he shaved his pubes and painted his butthole with lipstick he’d try to seduce her, intrigued as he was by her dentures, her sightless left eye. By the time I saw Zombieland I wanted to beat the fuck out of that kid on sight. I don’t know why. I wanted him to die in the movie though, and that made it great for me, much like a good lunch can cast a golden glow on the rest of the day.

Jesse Eisenberg (unsavory dweeb, an anomalous snake boy/man who invites a solid ass kicking with every word), Woody Harrelson (great), Zoey Deutch (wonderful), Abigail Breslin (rad), BILL MURRAY (a king among men), Rosario Dawson (talented, yummy), Dan Aykroyd (rad as well) and so many more. Zombieland Double Tap has great potential because of this ingredient list. I doubt they’ll kill off the weird cave elf in a suitably gruesome fashion, but a dude can dream. And the cosmos is my friend. It rewards my wild ambitions from time to time. Perhaps I’ll meet that creepy cancre Eisenberg in Mexico while I’m on vacation. And I just lost my wallet in a bar so I need some fast cash. Go cosmos! Go!

My introduction to The Micro Novels of Tory Seller

Available now at a bookstore near you.

Will Fight Evil 4 Food

This is the introduction I wrote for Micro Novels by Tory Seller, available now at bookstores and on Amazon.

What is a micro novel, you ask? A poem? Another exercise in avante garde dipshittery?

nov·el1

ˈnävəl/

noun

a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism.

So a micro novel would be what?? Let’s turn to another word before we begin the exploration.

ko·an

ˈkōän/

noun

a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.

Bob Seager, Zen Buddhism, The Easter Bunny, well, we’re still lost. Let’s take a look at the mind behind the micro novel. Without further adieu, let’s descend into an introduction to the enigmatic Tory Seller himself.

I met Tory in San Francisco a few years ago. I’d been invited down for an all expenses paid…

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Cosmetic Perfection In A Manuscript

Sadly, this cannot be done by a writer. I just spent ten days combing over a paper version of my new novel Perfect Lingerie. Hour after hour of checking one thing against another, crossing every T etcetera. To me, it looked… Perfect. My new agent took an entire day to carefully read it and this week we’ll spend a couple of hours going over it, fixing everything I missed. He’s been doing this for decades and he’s a stickler for every last detail, much like my very first agent, the great Richard Pine, and at no point can we afford to have an editor skip out of the narrative because of a typo or similar speed bump. Smooth. Everything has to be glassy smooth.

But I did get close, I’m told. This is my eight novel, and while I don’t feel like I’m far enough along to give any advice, this is what I did to get the ms as clean as I could.

The outline. Phase one. It was on a sheet of paper the size of a car hood so I should see the entire thing all at once. It was full of color codes and diagrams by the time I got started.

The FIRST draft was in Times. I tinkered with it extensively before I called it done. The SECOND draft was in Courier. For some reason my eye sees the content slightly differently.

The third draft was READ OUT LOUD to my fiancé. She did some knitting. It was mostly for me, to hear the way it rolled.

The fourth draft was on paper. I read it outside under the grape arbor and lounging in the guest room. Different place than the computer, different part of the house, different sounds, background. Different.

The fifth draft was done while entered the corrections from the paper copy.

And still, just like that first book Tattoo Machine, I’ll be going over the entire thing one last time before submissions. And I’m looking forward to it!

A Brief History of Portland Psychic Haiku

It started simply enough with an old manual typewriter and some yellow paper. No one can remember where any of it came from. I only remember it now because my old friend Brent Keith Warren and I just found each other after years of separation and, in addition to being partly to blame for our terrible detective agency Salazar and Wellington, Keith was a founding member.

Requisite was a dinner party. I’m actually having a dinner party at this exact moment but I’m hiding in the guest room. My fiancé can handle this for now. Every PPS event started with a dinner like this one. Often, there was booze, stories and music. And then we’d get into that manual typewriter.

A haiku is 5,7,5. The syllables would be divided up and everyone would get a few. They’d write them out and then I would assemble them in the order they were issued. No one knew what the people around them were writing and somehow many of them came together.

Spit curl boot scoot die

First there was a no not you

Bridget Bardot, me

And then we would take that haiku and one of us would run off into the evening and put it on the windshield of a car somewhere in the neighborhood. It looked like a ticket because of the paper, but it was… Super strange poetry. This often resulted in unexpected hilarity. One night some business guy followed a drunk haiku runner back to my house holding the poem in hand, utterly mystified. When we told him what it was and that he’d been selected through cosmic irony, dudeboy freaked out. It was the best thing that happened to him all month.

I just got a new ancient manual typewriter, once again without looking for one. Let the games begin.

Tattooing and Diabetes

Sunday here in the City of Roses and I snuck away from the latest draft of my new novel Perfect Lingerie to zap out some cool stuff at Kilroy’s Tattoo. I almost never tattoo anymore, but I miss it so there I was. It’s nice to get out of the house, especially on days like today. I was working with two guys, one younger than me by a few years and one a little bit older, but both of them like hearing stories about the good old days and I have them. I’ve been tattooing for twice as long as both of them combined and I can trace my path through this art all the way back to the end of the carnie era in the late 80’s. Today’s story was about diabetes.

I worked at this one place, street shop, and this old biker guys used to come around. His brain was massively fried and much of the time he spoke in grunts and whistles, very primitive man, and he often fixated on a single article in a magazine for hours. On the evening in question he was looking at Rolling Stone. Two or three of us were working and the place was reasonably quiet. And then, quite suddenly, hell broke loose.

A six foot bull dyke, mullet and all, came in and took over the lobby. She was big. She was fierce. And we were scared. She seemed so angry in the beginning, but after she realized no one there was going to give her any shit she settled down and eventually one of the artists was tattooing her. She fixated on the old biker, who’d been mute the entire time, himself fixated on the Clint Eastwood article in front of him. She started talking.

“It’s not men I hate,” she began. “It’s the dick. It- it seems unnatural to me. Bald. Pukey. I just can’t even think about it.” She sighed. “I got this gal at home, and when I go down on that, I swear, she’s sweet, like honey.”

The old biker with the fried brain looked up and they stared at each other. A lightbulb had gone on over his head. He was about to speak. All the machines went silent and we looked on in cringing anticipation.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully. “I bet your girlfriend has diabetes.”

Short film I will never make logline-

Grizzly Medicine 

A retired Army medic cruises the underworld saving the lost one life at a time in a world without hope or reason.